DaisyDisk 2.0.6 review

A useful, well-designed disk utility for your Mac

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Our Verdict

For

Incredibly pretty to look at

Find space-eating files easily

Against

Visual view of connected disks

A bit of a one-trick pony

Once upon a time, drive space was a very precious commodity. Now, though, even entry-level Macs come with 500GB or more, and if you buy a decent iMac you'll get the kind of storage that was the realm of supercomputers not so long ago.

So does the average Mac user really need a piece of software designed to help free up additional space? The answer, we think, is 'yes' – and DaisyDisk does it brilliantly.

DaisyDisk visually represents your hard drive as a concentric graph. This makes it really easy to drill down and find big files; once found, you drag them to the button at the bottom of the interface to collect the files, ready to be deleted.

DaisyDisk gives you a running tally of how much space you will save once you hit Delete. Click on a block in the 'daisy' and you can drill down as deep as you want, with a list of the files, folders and their sizes on the level you're looking at over to the right of the window.

On our test Mac, we were able to find about 40GB of Final Cut Express rendering files that we hadn't touched for two years, and deleted them. That's close to 10% of the usable space on the hard drive, saved in seconds; we're willing to bet that virtually every Mac user has something similar waiting to be reclaimed on their drive.

What makes DaisyDisk great to use, though, is how enticing the interface is. It positively encourages you to explore around your drive, and makes this simple part of maintaining your Mac a genuine pleasure.